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beccaelizabethRob Shearman
Writing for theatre and radio
RS says: Danger is RS can get academic and pompous. Likes to discuss something about his writing that isn’t Daleks. RS is Shakespeare’s natural successor. He’d be next to Shaw and Shakespeare in the library. [This is a funny. Alphabetically.]
He stammers. As a teen he couldn’t speak. [notes garbled, maybe] People made you think you were an idiot. Writing to get thoughts out. Public speaking to get around growing terror of opening his mouth.
[BE makes notes on this bit due to growing feeling of familiarity. My stutter hit later but YES. *sigh* ]
Talks too fast to get over the stutter.
Wrote. Accidental theatre writer. Left university already professionally staged. Won awards. Ars Council write rin residence, in charge of writing development and stuff.
Writing at the last minute.
[Like seriously the last minute. Play selling well, posters up, they’d ask him for a clue what it was about.]
RS writing based on poster.
“Terribly arrogant”
Looks back with some horror.
Only wanted to do theatre. Didn’t want TV. Got offers. Found there’s nothing like theatre. People put it down as small, and the audience know the stage is unreal, but that’s the beauty of it. You play a game with the audience. Tell them what they and you know isn’t true.
King Lear. Gloucester blinded. Led to the edge of a cliff. [I saw this on TV and it never occurred to me there was a real cliff there because we couldn’t see it, but on stage] We might think what we’re told is what we’re seeing. Shakespeare does this where he throws himself off and… it isn’t a cliff. Only then does Gloucester and the audience know. On TV you know right away.
[slightly incoherent note taking about a play where there’s two floors of a house, upstairs and downstairs, but they’re staged next to each other, and you get a lot of funny with characters looking up to react to things the audience sees across.] stage with up & down all one level, makes a joke.
RS clarifies: But the name of the play that was set on different levels of a house - but all floors represented on a flat stage - was Taking Steps by Alan Ayckbourn. The point I was making was that a *natural* or realistic presentation of events in the drama wouldn't be funny or revealing - it's only because theatre shows the artificiality that makes it work. (There's a play by Amadeus writer Peter Shaffer called Black Comedy, in which all the lights fuse - and as an audience we see the stage fully lit only when the characters are in darkness, and yet we're in blackout when the characters have the lights on. So you get this very funny image of all the actors blundering about on stage blindly, even though we can see them clearly - and yet moving about with ease when all we can do is hear them. Again, it'd look stupid anywhere but in the theatre.)
/RS
Theatre: what is real and what is not.
TV direct, theatre strange, say what you want, play with time. Can’t do that elsewhere… except radio.
Radio. Can’t see him. First adapted theatre plays.
Knew Martin Jarvis from Vengeance on Varos. Had to avoid saying ‘Governor’.
[and this would be a more useful note if I could remember what it goes with]
Gets cross about TV critics hating Theatre.
TV used to do theatre as theatre. Critic will attack theatre as pretentious and unnatural. Doesn’t see it *in* theatre, so, doesn’t work.
Same script but not same sensibility.
Theatre is about trying to reach the audience directly.
RS early play, “vile horrible”, about Holocaust Christmas.
Play done in traverse. [stage in the middle, audience on both sides, can look past the play to the other audience] watching show and audience. It’s about when do you stop finding it funny, what’s acceptable to find funny. Escalating forms of abuse. Sitcom world makes laughter but audience reacts to audience.
Best plays tease audience, do they accept it as true or not. Theatre that is not naturalistic can work, TV not so much.
Many plays juxtapose things in 2 patches, maybe of light, not meant to be next to each other or able to see each other.
Cuts/comparisons. [On TV when you cut between things you compare them.]
Theatre doesn’t direct you. Subtle.
TV can be used to subvert expectations. Subvert jump cuts, Donna. [library episodes]
Blackpool, Bollywood.
TV can do it.
RS biased. [he said. My notes say he said.]
TV uses theatre techniques & tries to sell them as innovative.
Theatre invites audience to accept conventions. Alienating at first. Oddest form of storytelling.
Can I tell this story so it can only be told in this medium.
Q about interative fiction.
RS aware. Interactive theatre. 10 playwrights in a day follow on [from what each has written]. Show off different styles & techniques. 24 hour plays on news items [prepared and staged in 24 hours]. People try and shake out ways to shake it up. At their best unique to medium.
Radio. Loves it. Does a lot. Always a game with the audience, decive, make the point you can’t see it.
[it would be helpful if a title could go here], play about language, man finds the whole language is changing around him, in 2 days every word changed, barrage of sound, then quacking. He quacks without understanding and becomes Prime Minister. Kids play, kids like to see dogs talk and kids bark. Adults? Explore lose identity lose words.
[My notes are less coherent partly because RS talks fast and interesting and partly because it was early Sunday.]
1994 white lies. Married couple aren’t good at talking. Talk through their imaginary best friend. Starts with two actors on stage, one going to the door and miming letting someone in. Audience think a character is being mimed, but. Wife starts having an affair with imaginary friend and at the same time husband asking advice on how to get closer to wife.
Became a radio play. Works, but it’s a different joke.
Different premis with the same lines.
Rewrite but the idea worked.
[another title] married couple, time warp, younger versions at the same time. Wreck lives. Younger version falls for older version.
Plays with stage space.
Or another play with consciences.
Or talk about height [tallness] of short actor. Conscience seen as the character they’re the conscience of.
“What you’re seeing on stage isn’t what the characters are seeing”
Theatre says to audience.
Q: Afternoon plays on Radio 4, also driving. Room for imagination in distracted audience?
RS: Part of the juggling act, present complex in simple way, follow story rather than gimmick; [even if] gimmick is what its about.
Teachers Pet? [that’s probably a title] Alternating scenes in different times. Play about time [to the makers] / Play about relationships [to the audience]
Then stick to device / structure. [this bit was about how the audience is smart, will pick up on the rules, but once you’ve set them you must follow them]
If the flashbacks are framed as someone’s memories all scenes have to have the pov of rememberer.
Break the rules? Audience are not stupid. Don’t need to consciously articulate the rule to know you’re cheating.
Audience accepts your jumps but knows if [you change direction or something].
Break the world in one way.
Everything around it is perfectly normal.
One type of weirdness.
RS [on ‘stop pointing that gun’] : You lie. Describing? Make it part of the game. Date, describe each other… then it turns out not quite true.
[Two people out on a date describe each other, out loud because it is radio. Then later they talk to different people and the descriptions turn out to be not quite true.]
Doctor can be witty “Don’t admire that calibre of pistol”
Direct + Twist
Its probably not as good as they’re saying, and you get that in the reactions.
Deceive audience, give information without them knowing.
N: “What are you doing here?” [is the note that goes with… I think someone saying someone they knew had collected every example of that phrase in a radio show]
RS: Video, Doctor Who eps, “What are you doing here?” in order, 8 minutes long. [find it on YouTube]
It starts ordinary, then gets boring, then becomes hilarious. All about timing and pacing.
Demonstrate how often its used.
[BE notes say ‘brain breaking how/why’.] Plot reason. TV grammar.
It’s the first thing Hartnell says in the show.
It covers the whole history of the show. Except 8 gets away with it.
Sometimes “What are you doing here?” in the cliffhanger, so it’s repeated immediately from the next episode.
You don’t often say it in real life. It forces exposition.
[next section has a header of topic] Christopher Eccleston -> Theatre & radio => Actors will change it.
Jubilee. Sequence meeting the Dalek. Similar. 6 haughty. 9?
CE hadn’t seen any Doctor Who. Watched Talons.
9 is furious & terrified. Extraordinary. Unexpected.
Different characters from same lines.
Especially in theatre. TV? One chance.
TV you don’t get to consult with actors. Theatre, in rehearsals for weeks.
[You hear lines in your head and know how you would say them but] You hope actors do lines better.
CE best performance in Dalek.
Script became very functional. Tried to be clever. Came down to Dalek showing powers. CE & BP humanised it. AND Nick Briggs. Made it a proper character. CE intense: “I’m a Holocaust survivor and you’re a Nazi”. Takes so seriously. [Which is what you want.]
Actors? Great service. Bland becomes crackle.
[and that’s the end of my notes. My notes aren’t very helpful in this case. Listening to the hour I felt that I’d learned a lot very quickly about how theatre is not TV is not radio and so on. Lots that’s useful and distinctive. Written down I’m not sure I captured that useful.]
Writing for theatre and radio
RS says: Danger is RS can get academic and pompous. Likes to discuss something about his writing that isn’t Daleks. RS is Shakespeare’s natural successor. He’d be next to Shaw and Shakespeare in the library. [This is a funny. Alphabetically.]
He stammers. As a teen he couldn’t speak. [notes garbled, maybe] People made you think you were an idiot. Writing to get thoughts out. Public speaking to get around growing terror of opening his mouth.
[BE makes notes on this bit due to growing feeling of familiarity. My stutter hit later but YES. *sigh* ]
Talks too fast to get over the stutter.
Wrote. Accidental theatre writer. Left university already professionally staged. Won awards. Ars Council write rin residence, in charge of writing development and stuff.
Writing at the last minute.
[Like seriously the last minute. Play selling well, posters up, they’d ask him for a clue what it was about.]
RS writing based on poster.
“Terribly arrogant”
Looks back with some horror.
Only wanted to do theatre. Didn’t want TV. Got offers. Found there’s nothing like theatre. People put it down as small, and the audience know the stage is unreal, but that’s the beauty of it. You play a game with the audience. Tell them what they and you know isn’t true.
King Lear. Gloucester blinded. Led to the edge of a cliff. [I saw this on TV and it never occurred to me there was a real cliff there because we couldn’t see it, but on stage] We might think what we’re told is what we’re seeing. Shakespeare does this where he throws himself off and… it isn’t a cliff. Only then does Gloucester and the audience know. On TV you know right away.
[slightly incoherent note taking about a play where there’s two floors of a house, upstairs and downstairs, but they’re staged next to each other, and you get a lot of funny with characters looking up to react to things the audience sees across.] stage with up & down all one level, makes a joke.
RS clarifies: But the name of the play that was set on different levels of a house - but all floors represented on a flat stage - was Taking Steps by Alan Ayckbourn. The point I was making was that a *natural* or realistic presentation of events in the drama wouldn't be funny or revealing - it's only because theatre shows the artificiality that makes it work. (There's a play by Amadeus writer Peter Shaffer called Black Comedy, in which all the lights fuse - and as an audience we see the stage fully lit only when the characters are in darkness, and yet we're in blackout when the characters have the lights on. So you get this very funny image of all the actors blundering about on stage blindly, even though we can see them clearly - and yet moving about with ease when all we can do is hear them. Again, it'd look stupid anywhere but in the theatre.)
/RS
Theatre: what is real and what is not.
TV direct, theatre strange, say what you want, play with time. Can’t do that elsewhere… except radio.
Radio. Can’t see him. First adapted theatre plays.
Knew Martin Jarvis from Vengeance on Varos. Had to avoid saying ‘Governor’.
[and this would be a more useful note if I could remember what it goes with]
Gets cross about TV critics hating Theatre.
TV used to do theatre as theatre. Critic will attack theatre as pretentious and unnatural. Doesn’t see it *in* theatre, so, doesn’t work.
Same script but not same sensibility.
Theatre is about trying to reach the audience directly.
RS early play, “vile horrible”, about Holocaust Christmas.
Play done in traverse. [stage in the middle, audience on both sides, can look past the play to the other audience] watching show and audience. It’s about when do you stop finding it funny, what’s acceptable to find funny. Escalating forms of abuse. Sitcom world makes laughter but audience reacts to audience.
Best plays tease audience, do they accept it as true or not. Theatre that is not naturalistic can work, TV not so much.
Many plays juxtapose things in 2 patches, maybe of light, not meant to be next to each other or able to see each other.
Cuts/comparisons. [On TV when you cut between things you compare them.]
Theatre doesn’t direct you. Subtle.
TV can be used to subvert expectations. Subvert jump cuts, Donna. [library episodes]
Blackpool, Bollywood.
TV can do it.
RS biased. [he said. My notes say he said.]
TV uses theatre techniques & tries to sell them as innovative.
Theatre invites audience to accept conventions. Alienating at first. Oddest form of storytelling.
Can I tell this story so it can only be told in this medium.
Q about interative fiction.
RS aware. Interactive theatre. 10 playwrights in a day follow on [from what each has written]. Show off different styles & techniques. 24 hour plays on news items [prepared and staged in 24 hours]. People try and shake out ways to shake it up. At their best unique to medium.
Radio. Loves it. Does a lot. Always a game with the audience, decive, make the point you can’t see it.
[it would be helpful if a title could go here], play about language, man finds the whole language is changing around him, in 2 days every word changed, barrage of sound, then quacking. He quacks without understanding and becomes Prime Minister. Kids play, kids like to see dogs talk and kids bark. Adults? Explore lose identity lose words.
[My notes are less coherent partly because RS talks fast and interesting and partly because it was early Sunday.]
1994 white lies. Married couple aren’t good at talking. Talk through their imaginary best friend. Starts with two actors on stage, one going to the door and miming letting someone in. Audience think a character is being mimed, but. Wife starts having an affair with imaginary friend and at the same time husband asking advice on how to get closer to wife.
Became a radio play. Works, but it’s a different joke.
Different premis with the same lines.
Rewrite but the idea worked.
[another title] married couple, time warp, younger versions at the same time. Wreck lives. Younger version falls for older version.
Plays with stage space.
Or another play with consciences.
Or talk about height [tallness] of short actor. Conscience seen as the character they’re the conscience of.
“What you’re seeing on stage isn’t what the characters are seeing”
Theatre says to audience.
Q: Afternoon plays on Radio 4, also driving. Room for imagination in distracted audience?
RS: Part of the juggling act, present complex in simple way, follow story rather than gimmick; [even if] gimmick is what its about.
Teachers Pet? [that’s probably a title] Alternating scenes in different times. Play about time [to the makers] / Play about relationships [to the audience]
Then stick to device / structure. [this bit was about how the audience is smart, will pick up on the rules, but once you’ve set them you must follow them]
If the flashbacks are framed as someone’s memories all scenes have to have the pov of rememberer.
Break the rules? Audience are not stupid. Don’t need to consciously articulate the rule to know you’re cheating.
Audience accepts your jumps but knows if [you change direction or something].
Break the world in one way.
Everything around it is perfectly normal.
One type of weirdness.
RS [on ‘stop pointing that gun’] : You lie. Describing? Make it part of the game. Date, describe each other… then it turns out not quite true.
[Two people out on a date describe each other, out loud because it is radio. Then later they talk to different people and the descriptions turn out to be not quite true.]
Doctor can be witty “Don’t admire that calibre of pistol”
Direct + Twist
Its probably not as good as they’re saying, and you get that in the reactions.
Deceive audience, give information without them knowing.
N: “What are you doing here?” [is the note that goes with… I think someone saying someone they knew had collected every example of that phrase in a radio show]
RS: Video, Doctor Who eps, “What are you doing here?” in order, 8 minutes long. [find it on YouTube]
It starts ordinary, then gets boring, then becomes hilarious. All about timing and pacing.
Demonstrate how often its used.
[BE notes say ‘brain breaking how/why’.] Plot reason. TV grammar.
It’s the first thing Hartnell says in the show.
It covers the whole history of the show. Except 8 gets away with it.
Sometimes “What are you doing here?” in the cliffhanger, so it’s repeated immediately from the next episode.
You don’t often say it in real life. It forces exposition.
[next section has a header of topic] Christopher Eccleston -> Theatre & radio => Actors will change it.
Jubilee. Sequence meeting the Dalek. Similar. 6 haughty. 9?
CE hadn’t seen any Doctor Who. Watched Talons.
9 is furious & terrified. Extraordinary. Unexpected.
Different characters from same lines.
Especially in theatre. TV? One chance.
TV you don’t get to consult with actors. Theatre, in rehearsals for weeks.
[You hear lines in your head and know how you would say them but] You hope actors do lines better.
CE best performance in Dalek.
Script became very functional. Tried to be clever. Came down to Dalek showing powers. CE & BP humanised it. AND Nick Briggs. Made it a proper character. CE intense: “I’m a Holocaust survivor and you’re a Nazi”. Takes so seriously. [Which is what you want.]
Actors? Great service. Bland becomes crackle.
[and that’s the end of my notes. My notes aren’t very helpful in this case. Listening to the hour I felt that I’d learned a lot very quickly about how theatre is not TV is not radio and so on. Lots that’s useful and distinctive. Written down I’m not sure I captured that useful.]